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There are a number of short informal spontaneous prayers to be seen

of these rituals are of the formal kind which if not quoted in full are pra: 117) referred to by the quotation of their first line.^^^^The informal prayers

i

[The anger'] of the gods consumes the land. |

I The second exemple recounts the words of the eagle cast into the pit by #

4 the serpent who s.elzed him and tore off his wings, pinions and talons

after he had entered a dead wild ox in whose carcass the eagle was hiding. "Am I to perish in the pit?

Who knows how thy punishment was inposed on me? Save the life of me, the eagle.

And I will sound thy name unto eternity!"

This lament of the eagle demonstrates a structure typical of lamentation ,, prayers and speeches in the Old Testament: Lamenting Question/Petition/

ll4) Reason,

in the various rituals of the first millenium B.C. Mostly the prayers ’ !

are however, as far as we can make out,non-lamenting in character.

Among the formal lamentations the plaint over personal problems and sufferings hardly exists in Individual prayer. The inhu or "Song of Sighs", which is the only witness to this kind of prayer, only exists in isolated royal prayers. An example is the prayer of Tukulti Nlnurta'

preserved in a Sumerian and Akkadian bilingual text. Another is the lament­ ation prayer of Assurbanipal which concludes a self-laudatory inscription for the king’s work on restoring several small temples in Assyria and in

however, that êigu Is not used as a title for any of the penitential psalms in p]

123) 1?2)

available to us. They occur only in prayer spells and in particular

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]

3

"God and men, dead and living / I did good.

Why have''sickness, melancholia, / aonsumption and wasting dogged my footsteps?

In the land discord recedes, / in my house savage disputes not of my making;

Sedition and railing / are constantly ranged against me. Deep distress and bodily suffering / have distorted my form, "Woe!" and "Ah!" have devoured my days.

On the day of the clty-god, / on the monthly festival I am disturbed,

I am doomed to death; / I fall into the deepest distress. In anguish of mind and misery / I conplain day and night, I have become so weary: "0 God, give not (this) to the

god-fearing; Till when, 0 God, will you do this to me?

As one who fears not God and the Goddess/ I am dealt with."

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It is probable that this prayer originally concluded with a confession of sins subsequently lost. If It did contain a confession it would have belonged to the ^igu group of prayers of penitents which are often met with in the rituals and particularly in the Uererologia, The difficulty is.

»

are associated with the Inim'-inim-ma,

A sharp distinction between penitential prayers and hymns with

prayers attached on the one hand and between prayer-spells on the other is not in every case possible given the nature of the fragnentary texts.

This situation is aggravated through the fact that the penitential prayers ,î| admit the recognition of no unitary construction so that a Gattmg in the

strict sense cannot be spoken of. The penitential prayer is distinguishable from the spell-prayers above all through its omission of magical elements and specific formula such as the self-laudAtory pieces. It also uses a distirftüve poetic language which is highly artificial]particularly in

12G)

later times.

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The overwhelming Impression received from reading the lamentation

prayers from Mesopotamia is that those who offered them were extraordinarily

concerned with the question of guilt and its expiation Particularly

in later times, when the penitential rituals became increasingly marked by

the use of divination and magic, this concern with guilt known and unknown

dominated their thinking to the point of morbidity. In marked contrast

the lamentations of pre-exilic Israel rarely make the connection between

sin and suffering^and confession of sin is not a prominent feature of '# nly in the post-exilic

128)

them3^^^ It is only in the post-exilic period that prayers are marked

by extended confessions of sin and guilt.

******************************

The brief survey of Egyptian, Hittite and Mesopotamian lamentation

prayers just concluded is by no means exhaustive and therefore it is

inadequate to be used as a basis for a detailed comparison with the

Israelite prayers we shall be examining in the following chapters.

What conparative conclusions we have drawn must be seen as largely

tentative and strongly influenced by the work of those scholars who have

worked extensively in the field. A detailed comparison lies outside the

scope of this Investigation. What we hope we have accomplished is a

background sketch of the sort of prayers used in the ancient Near East

about the same time as the pre-exilic prayers of ancient Israel came

into existence. By so doing an international context has been provided in which the Israelite prayers may be set.

The recently discovered Tell Mardikh tablets may shed further light

on the relationship between Israelite and Mesopotamian prayers. Egypt,

however, apparently exerted little if any influence on the Israelite

prayers. As far as the Hittite material is concerned it is likely that

what similarities exist arose out of the common influence of Mesopotamia

24

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Thus in this chapter an attenpt has been made to provide a broad

veligionsgesGhiahtliche context for the understanding of Old Testament

prayer in general and pre-exilic Israelite prose lamentation prayers in

particular. We now move on to look at the scholarly debate which has

gone on over the past half century and more over the liturgical lamentations

in the Old Testament, We believe such a survey will help us to Identify and understand better the non-liturgioal lamentation prayers.

I

1

CHAPTER 2 g

In this chapter three things are attempted: first,

we shall look at the Psalm Lamentations and other related

compositions; secondly, we shall review the scholarly

debate which has gone on over this material; and thirdly, |i

we shall attempt on the basis of the foregoing to provide

working criteria for the identification of the prose

lamentation prayers. In actual fact the first two tasks /

run concurrently since the interpretation of the Lamentation

Psalms Types cannot be separated from the efforts of the

German and Scandanavian scholars whose contribution to the

study of the Psalms has been of considerable Importance, ]

The third task is necessary because we need to know what

we are looking for when we read through the prose narratives

of the Hebrew Bible.

I

f

;

(

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Gunkel’s work on the biblical Psalms and, more Iriportantly for the

purpose of this study, the lamentations of the Old Testament arose out

of his concern to identify and define the literary types {Gattungen)

of the Old Testament. Up until Gunkel’s time the scholarly approach

had been mainly philological and theological - in particular it had

attarpted to understand the psychological states of personal piety lying

2

)

behind the Psalmists and their prayers. The great contribution of

Gunkel to the scholarly understanding of the Psalms was the delineation

of the rules by which any investigator must work. Gunkel’s basic principle of evaluation of the Psalms (or any literary conposltion for

that matter) was that it had to be carried out in accordance with the very

same rules which governed their composition. These rules can be determined

by inV65hgo4*ion of the, history of eoch Into wh*oh the ?5olms c«n be, d w i d e d , in so far as the development of each

type can be traced. Gunkel distinguished four major and five minor Psalm

types. The two relevant to this study belong to the former ; the Individual

and Communal Psalms of Lamentation.

Gunkel’s rules for the Identification of a Psalm type are three

Pimty the Psalm must belong to a definite and identifiable outtio

occasion or Sits im Leben, This occasion can only be identified with ' ^

difficulty from the Psalms themselves so that we are dependent on

descriptions of cultic events elsewhere in the Old Testament to fill in

the details. (Where such details are lacking as in the case of the

Individual Lamentation there has been a good deal of debate among scholars

as to their precise original cultic Sits. The controversy has also been

complicated by the dispute over the identification of the "I" in the

i

27.

g:60(?Md, the Psalm must exhibit the a»gZ moaja characteristic of

the type to which it belongs. These will demonstrate that it was composed ^

for its specific cultic occasion since that determines what stereotypes |

of vocabulary and grammar are to be used in the Psalm’s construction.

Such motifs and moods are capable of fairly precise definition through

the carefhl analysis of the language of the Psalms belonging to each type.

Thirds the Psalm mist exhibit a common litemry stmature or fom which i

binds together the various individual elements characteristic of the type.

Gunkel admits, however, that in many cases this is not altogether clear

and as far as the individual Lamentation Psalms are concerned it can

scarcely now be recognized.

In drawing up these rules Gunkel made certain basic assumptions which led him to believe that the Individual Lamentations as we have

received them in the Hebrew Bible have been tom from their original -I

Sits im Lehen and therefore no longer exhibit the original structure which would have characterized them in pre-exilic Is r a el.The assumptions

are first, that there once existed in ancient Israel pure forms of the

various Psalm types which generally can be reconstructed from an examination

of the existing complex and mixed forms that arose in the late Monarchy and

post-exilic periods; and, seoondly^ that corresponding to the degeneration

in literary form is the evolution of Israelite religion from fairly

primitive beginnings througli cultic forms to more developed spiritualized

personal piety. Cultic religion in which the assumed pure forms of

lamentation arose is, so Gunkel believed, on a lower level of man’s

religio-cultural evolution iHan his personal piety expressed in non-cultic terms. To this personal piety belong the developed forms of the

f À-"' V w j v a-vt^v-a j-■■-■t -.,;î t a-, - X : - w ' -''4' ' " --ï-,-,-^, -tÇAj. ,,.A

28

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whether personal piety with its emphasis on Individual experience should

be regarded as an advance on cultic religion which emphasises the comtnunal

involvement in religious experience. In other words Gunkel was a child of

his age as we are of ours.

But the rejection of Gunkel’s assumptions does not abrogate the

validity of his research particularly that into the structure and form of the Psalm Lamentations. According to Gunkel both the Individual and

the sinple Ur fom or pure lamentation is hardly to be glimpsed in the j

Hebrew Psalter. It is submerged beneath the spiritualized laments of

pious individuals in the period after the Exile,

The passage of time has shown these assumptions to be invalid, For

one thing the form of the Individual Lamentation was shared with both the

Akkadians and the non-Semltic Sumerians who antedate the Israelite state

by at least a millenium". If this is so it is possible for the so-called

mixed types of the Old Testament to hAve resulted from developments even |

before the Solomonic temple came into existence,Furthermore recent

studies in oral transmission and composition have shown that the precise

form of a type together with what admixtures or expansions are used

depend on the time, situation and the one recounting the story or song.^^

Thus a tale may be pared down to the barest bones or elaborated with all

I

sorts of additional material according to the occasion. A simple form does i

not necessarily mean early nor an elaborate one late composition. Siirpli-

city certainly does not insure against late composition. Moreover it is

now generally recognized that the old evolutionary approach to the develop-

7)

ment of Israelite religion is untenable. And from the study of religious

phenomenology it can be shown that the existence of a cultus does not

preclude the expression of personal p i e t y . Indeed it may be questioned

In document Gerencia de Operaciones y Atención al Cliente Transportista en el Peaje Monterrico de la Empresa LAMSAC, Santiago de Surco 2016 (página 38-41)